~ the illustrated garden studio blog

Tag Archives: green living

Three blocks from my garden, I can stand at the edge of Mobile Bay and see the shipping channel way off to the southwest — the very route that a cargo ship from South America took on a balmy day in the 1920s, its crew unaware that the soil they carried as ballast was infested with red fire ants. The ants loved everything about Alabama: warm temperatures, abundant food supplies, lots of moisture — and best of all, the predator species who control fire ant populations had missed the boat and were still back home in the Southern Hemisphere.

Now they range from Texas to Maryland, pushing ever farther into the northern states as winters turn milder. And, despite a few redeeming qualities — they eat cockroach eggs, for example — fire ants are bad news for your garden. Their mounds are sprawling and destructive, they will damage or consume a surprising assortment of soft-fleshed vegetables, and a busy colony can wipe out beneficial insects (and lizards and even small birds) with speedy efficiency. They can also sting the daylights out of you in a synchronized attack, using a pheromone signal to coordinate dozens of ants who swarm up your arm or leg, simultaneously bite to get a grip and then use their stingers to deliver a burning dose of toxic venom. Recent studies of the active ingredient in that venom reveal some antibiotic and anti-HIV qualities, but I have not found much comfort in that as I frantically scramble for the garden hose to rinse off two dozen stinging fire ants.

After throwing an arsenal of chemical insecticides at the ever-growing fire ant population over the years, and only succeeding in wiping out large populations of competitive ant species to give fire ants even better odds in their quest for world domination, we humans have given up on eradication. County extension services now advise gardeners on fire ant management. For people like me, who shudder at the prospect of using chemical ant baits anywhere near the organic veggie patch, there is a tiny glimmer of hope in the gradual rise of the phorid fly. As tiny as the nostril on a Lincoln penny, it has a life cycle like a Stephen King novel: the little fly hovers above a fire ant and lays a microscopic egg in the ant’s shiny brown thorax. When the fly larvae hatches, it dines awhile on non-vital ant innards and then migrates to its ultimate destination, the ant’s head. Now the ant’s body is no longer useful to the larva, so it releases an enzyme which dissolves the neck membrane and makes the ant’s head fall off. Yikes. Compared to the fate of being decapitated by a hungry parasite, my own fire ant management technique seems almost humane.

I invite my fire ants to join me for tea. Well, actually, they don’t get much past the steeping part. Decades ago, when I read that boiling water could be used as an effective ant control, I started carrying my steaming tea kettle out into the garden and poured its contents over fire ant mounds with consistently good results. A medium-sized mound in the garden takes about a gallon and a half (three large tea kettles) and I have discovered that it’s not necessary to dig beneath the surface or to drench everything that moves — you are not killing the colony, which lies mostly well below the surface, but you are providing them with a powerful incentive to move away. And they do. I have poured boiling water into cracks in walkways, along the edges of raised beds and at the foundation line of fire-ant-infested sheds and most often, they are gone within two days. Sometimes a second tea party is needed. Also, remember that boiling water will kill garden plants and beneficial insects, so pour with discretion.

Did you have a favorite stuffed animal when you were a child? I did. Actually, I still do. Mine was a tall, slim stuffed cat who now sits on the corner of my drawing table. He’s nearly 50 and all his fur was rubbed off long ago. He has one serene green glass eye left, and he leans to one side. But he’s been a faithful friend since I was four years old — and came out of retirement to befriend my daughters when they were small — so that makes him absolutely beautiful to me.

Just in time for Christmas, I’m giving away a wonderful stuffed kitty by Sweet Paisley Studio. Handmade with cleverly upcycled fabrics and block-printed features, this cutie will delight the cat lover on your holiday gift list. (I particularly like those long, stripey legs.)

Leave a comment below to be entered in the drawing — be sure your comment links back to your blog or email so that I can notify you if you win. Selection will be made this Saturday, Dec. 17 by www.random.org. Good luck!

Nature Drawing Workshop: Winter’s Tale (Saturday, Feb. 25 from 10am-3pm, Five Rivers Delta Resource Center, on the Causeway in Spanish Fort, AL) The stories of spring lie hidden just beneath the surface as winter draws to a close along the Gulf Coast. There is a simple beauty in bare branches, seed pods, tiny buds emerging and the first insects to venture forth as the seasons turn back toward warmer days. Spend a day in one of Alabama’s most beautiful waterfront settings, using traditional drawing techniques to create elegant and accurate drawings of winter nature subjects in pen-and-ink. No experience necessary! All art supplies provided. This event helps support wildlife education programs at 5 Rivers. $60

Embellished with original illustrations and hand lettering, GIFT CERTIFICATES are now available for all classes and workshops listed here. Email me to request one: studio@valwebb.com.

Ahhh… Cooler temperatures are finally here, and the front-yard garden is thriving in the absence of oppressive heat and hungry insects. Broccoli and cabbages line the front walk, hemmed with a few multiplier onions and some sprawling purple petunias at one end. This bed was created in a single early October afternoon, by double-digging the existing topsoil with a spade and then hoeing in a two-inch layer of clean, crumbly black mushroom compost. (I use mushroom compost because human sewage sludge — delicately referred to as “biosolids” in the federal regulations that allow it to be lumped in as compost and sold to unsuspecting gardeners — is frequently lurking in commercial bagged manure products. Ewwww.)

At the far end, some Brussels sprouts snuggle up to a row of romaine lettuce. Next week, when the romaine is harvested, I’ll fill in their little slice of real estate with some yellow globe onions. After several years of large-scale gardening, I really love working on a more intimate scale… planting and transplanting just a few square feet at a time provides a constant parade of assorted produce. I probably need to exercise more self-control in this area, though. Does anyone really need nine varieties of lettuce? Salads, anyone?

Some of the aforementioned lettuces are in the “baby bed” next to the driveway. I set out seedlings very close together and they grew in a leafy mound that can be gradually eaten as the baby lettuces are thinned out, allowing the remaining plants to reach full size. These little fellows are Tango Early Oakleaf, Lolla Rosa and Red Sails, all from Good Scents Herbs and Flowers in Robertsdale, Alabama. In other beds are Deer Tongue, Arugula and Tom Thumb.

Gypsy sweet peppers, Buttercrunch lettuce, more Oakleaf, onions and giant mutant basil share one raised bed. Each bed is 4×4 and 10 inches high, filled with equal parts peat moss, mushroom compost and vermiculite. I use pine needles for mulch. Thanks to a trio of towering longleaf pines overhanging the yard, mulch falls conveniently out of the sky every day.

Meanwhile, the newer raised bed is home to Red Bor kale, Swiss chard, and some upwardly mobile heirloom snap peas on a scrounged-bamboo-and-Zip-tie trellis.

My backyard is small, and only a few precious spots receive the full sun that herb plants crave. Some of the sunniest real estate is a skinny strip against the south side of a storage shed. The peppermint in the background, doing its level best to climb out of a wooden crate, sprouted from a single cutting in August.A pocket garden at one end of the shed has snap peas, bulb fennel, cardoon and a few leftover lettuces. And that protective fence embracing all the backyard plantings — the hardware store refers to it as rabbit wire, but it’s beagle wire to me.

I have always worked with messy forms of art — printmaking and clay — that are unwise to attempt inside your home. So, over the years, an assortment of outbuildings served as my workspaces: a pumphouse, a carport, even a chicken house. Now I have three wonderful, sunny rooms in an old wooden house. It feels very luxurious.

My printmaking supplies are in the kitchen. These old wooden candy boxes make a great place to display old printing blocks; the painting on top is by Fairhope artist/designer Patti Miller.

The back porch is enclosed to create a peaceful spot with three large north-facing windows. It’s a perfect spot to read, to meditate or to teach small-group drawing classes. I keep an easel tucked in the corner, but it’s mostly for the use of company, since I seldom paint in oils or acrylics.

The largest room houses the clay studio. The long table gives me room to lay out big wall panels or dry freshly rolled slabs. The adjustable steel shelving is from a restaurant supply store.

I love to find new uses for “rescued” materials. This old refrigerator door makes a good magnetic bulletin board, and can be detached from the wall and carried to shows to serve as a magnet display.

Mark designed and built this rolling workbench with storage. It consists of two salvaged office file cabinets, some plywood, some canvas and four heavy-duty coasters. The stool came from a turn-of-the-century candy factory in New Orleans.

A strip of sheet metal and some recycled soup cans make a tool organizer. Each can has a magnet glued to the back, so I can grab the can and pull it right off the wall if I need to have it nearby while I’m working:

I’m doing laundry today, and feeling a twinge of guilt each time I shut the dryer door and press the button to start the wet clothes tumbling. You can count on an Alabama summer to provide blast-furnace heat each day — heat that will dry those soggy jeans almost as fast as you can hang them out — but it’s awfully easy to find reasons to default to the convenience of my electric dryer. I know better, of course. Hanging my clothes outside is a simple way to shrink my household environmental footprint. Dryers gobble up a considerable amount of electricity — more watts per hour than washers, water heaters, air conditioners or dishwashers — but a clothesline doesn’t use any at all. I think about the oily mess unfolding on the Gulf coast beaches 30 miles south of my house, a disaster that resulted at least in part from our huge national appetite for energy, and I resolve to do better.

Levi Strauss & Co. is getting in on the energy-saving act through a contest called Care to Air. They’re seeking ideas that will improve or replace the clothesline, and anyone can participate. Air drying ideas will be accepted until July 31, and winners will be announced in August. In addition to the satisfaction of helping to cut energy use, five finalists will win $500. A panel of judges will award prizes ranging from $4,500 to $1,000 for first, second and crowd favorite (that last category will be decided by online votes). Levi’s new clothing care tags urge their customers to only use cold water for laundering, to line dry and to donate old jeans to Goodwill.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the hardware store for some clothesline.

Out in the winter garden, it’s cold and rainy. But on my drawing table, it’s the middle of June and the homegrown tomatoes are ready for picking. I’m halfway through with the new children’s seed package design for a group of young organic farmers out in Sonoma County, California. The open-pollinated heirloom seeds inside the finished package will find their way into the hands of schoolchildren and neighborhood community gardeners. I love being part of this process.

Design work also provides a welcome opportunity to listen to podcasts while I draw and paint. Last week I discovered City Farmer Stories, broadcast from Vancouver. And yesterday, tucked into the newest issue of Organic Gardening between an article on tracking chipmunks and another about peace trees in Hiroshima, was info on three more audio opportunities:

Heritage Radio Network features a smorgasbord of different programs hosted by chefs, farmers, artists and even — according to OG — the occasional artisanal cheesemaker.

There was a beautiful Eastern Black Swallowtail in the fennel patch yesterday. This morning, the herb’s tender green shoots were peppered with tiny butterfly eggs. The little orbs are pale yellow now, but they will turn black just before they hatch into small caterpillars. In several stages, these fast-growing creatures will pass through increasingly vivid color patterns — all the while steadily consuming an impressive quantity of fennel, parsley and dill. Individuals lucky enough to avoid hungry wasps will eventually transform into a chrysalis and, finally, something that looks a lot like this:

(c)2009 Val Webb

Meanwhile, we have defaulted to our usual steamy south Alabama late-summer gardening schedule. Manual labor is now limited to really, really early in the morning. We’re prepping beds for fall planting, checking our saved seed and picking those die-hard eggplant and peppers… and some scrumptious ambrosia canteloupe that the Perfect Man incorporated into an experiment in edible landscaping.

Summer is also canning time. Last week, it was green tomato chow-chow… and this week, it was blueberry jam. The hardest part is not opening the jars immediately and devouring the carefully preserved contents. It’s a treat to live with a man who has impressive food preservation skills! (Here’s a tip for any guys out there who might be contemplating an online dating service: just be sure your profile includes the fact that you’re inordinately fond of Mason jars and pressure cookers, and then stand back.)

When it comes to scary subject matter — the stuff you try not to think about when you wake unexpectedly at 2 a.m. — Stephen King can’t hold a candle to Poisonous Plants of the Southern United States. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen to you within 48 hours of, say, nibbling a little lantana from your curbside landscaping, this handy guide from West Virginia University will tell you in excrutiating detail. (Don’t read the lantana section if you are about to have lunch. You’ve been warned.)

Eeeeeeeeek!

As the grandmother of two toddler girls who love to pick flowers, I’m all for nontoxic landscaping. Better yet, edible landscaping. So this year, while our regular backyard garden is doing its usual exuberant summer thing…

… some food crops have replaced traditional landscape plants on the “public” side of the fence. Five itty-bitty Bush Pickle cucumber plants, tucked next to a privacy fence and around the foot of an antique urn, have produced several dozen fat seven-inch cukes and show no signs of slowing. No sign of wilt or insect infestation, either — which, here in the coastal subtropics, is cause for rejoicing.

We tried a ten-foot row of Greasyback Cornstalk beans, a wonderful heirloom that was my great-grandmother’s garden favorite, against a section of privacy fence. A strip of plastic bird netting is tacked to the fence posts to give the beanstalks something to grab. I’m watering them with a dipper from our algae-rich fish pond, and they’re producing lots of characteristically knobby, slightly shiny green beans. Some catnip and St. Francis finish off the little bed.

There’s something very satisfying about landscaping with table fare. Our lawn crops over the past two years have expanded to include citrus, blueberries and culinary ginger, and we want to keep moving in that direction. Eating the yard isn’t for everyone — there are a lot of folks living in suburban housing developments with restrictive covenants, for example, and inner-city gardeners whose street gardens are fraught with unforeseen hazards.

But, personally, I love the idea of yanking out a poisonous invasive and replacing it with something the grandbabies can happily harvest. Hey, lantana! Let’s see you do this: